BJP’s Suvendu takes a lead over TMC’s Pabitra Kar in Nandigram

Nandigram is the constituency where, in 2021, Suvendu Adhikari defeated TMC supremo Mamata Banerjee.

BJP candidate for Bhabanipur and Nandigram, Suvendu Adhikari, visits a polling station in Kolkata | Photo: PTI

New Delhi: BJP’s Suvendu Adhikari was leading Trinamool Congress’s Pabitra Kar by 3,874 votes in West Bengal’s Nandigram assembly constituency, after four rounds of counting by the Election Commission till Monday morning.

Few results in this Bengal election carry comparable symbolic weight. Nandigram is the constituency where, in 2021, Adhikari defeated TMC supremo Mamata Banerjee—handing her the only electoral loss of her career and forcing her to contest a by-poll in TMC’s Bhabanipur to retain her position as chief minister.

Adhikari, the incumbent MLA and Leader of the Opposition, was for long Banerjee’s second-in-command before defecting to the BJP. He was elected MLA from the TMC twice—from Kanthi Dakshin in 2006 and from Nandigram in 2016. Adhikari had cited differences with Mamata’s nephew Abhishek Banerjee, the party’s national general secretary, when he resigned and joined the BJP in December 2020.

The 2021 Nandigram contest was freighted with high personal stakes. Adhikari vowed he would quit politics if he did not win by a margin of at least 50,000 votes. He won by less than one per cent. The narrow escape nonetheless made him Banerjee’s principal challenger, and he has occupied that position since.

This election, Adhikari is also the BJP’s candidate in Kolkata’s Bhabanipur—where Banerjee is the incumbent—in a direct bid to hand her a second consecutive defeat. Both camps held rival rallies barely 100 metres apart in the constituency on 25 April.

TMC’s Kar is also a former Adhikari loyalist. Kar crossed over to the BJP slightly before Adhikari in 2020 and was considered among the ground-level organisers credited with building the network that delivered the 2021 victory.

He returned to the TMC fold hours before the party announced its candidate list for the 2026 election in March. He said he had grown disillusioned with the BJP, and attributed Adhikari’s 2021 win to “organisation I painstakingly nurtured”.

He plans, he said, to defeat Adhikari by around 30,000 votes.

The BJP’s position in Nandigram has consolidated since 2021. It won 11 of 17 gram panchayat seats in the constituency in 2023, and in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, carried the Tamluk constituency—which includes Nandigram segment—by a victory margin of nearly 80,000 votes.

One in four residents of Nandigram belongs to the state’s Muslim minority.

Adhikari has addressed that diversity in characteristically combative terms. He told ANI on 28 April that he expected a larger Hindu turnout than in the previous election, while also asserting that “educated Muslims” who “do not have a problem with Vande Mataram” would vote BJP.

Kar was sceptical, saying that he did not believe Adhikari would attract minority votes.

The constituency’s significance predates both this rivalry.

Before 2009, it was a stronghold of the Communist Party of India under the Left Front’s 34-year rule. In 2007, mass protests erupted against a state government plan to acquire land for a chemical hub; at least 14 farmers were shot dead by police, with dozens more reportedly injured or missing. The outrage fuelled the 2009 bypoll, in which the TMC’s Firoza Bibi unseated the CPI’s Paramananda Bharati by over 40,000 votes—a result widely read as the first sign of the Left Front’s impending collapse. The ruling alliance lost three-quarters of its Assembly seats in the 2011 elections that brought the TMC to power.

The Nandigram agitation helped make both Banerjee, who led the TMC through the protests, and Adhikari, who emerged as one of Bengal’s key political mobilisers. That the seat fell to the BJP in 2021 remained, for the TMC, an open wound. Reclaiming it would mean more than recovering a constituency; losing it again would mean a second consecutive defeat.

For the BJP, a win here would reinforce its claim that the 2021 Bengal breakthrough—when the party rose from three seats to 77, largely at the expense of a near-wiped-out Congress and Left—was no one-off.

By-polls and defections have since trimmed that tally to 65, but the party goes into this assembly election with the ambition of unseating the Banerjee government.

A result in Adhikari’s favour would consolidate his standing as Banerjee’s most credible challenger, and make the case that the BJP’s Bengal project has moved from emergence to permanence.

(Edited by Prerna Madan)